SleuthSayers: The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year

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The Rap Sheet: Snoops Site Thrives at 25

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SleuthSayers: From the Memoirs of a Private Detective

SleuthSayers: From the Memoirs of a Private Detective: This piece appeared in Smart Set Magazine in 1923. -Robert Lopresti FROM THE MEMOIRS OF A PRIVATE DETECTIVE by Dashiell Hammett  1. Wishin...

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Review: "The Promise: An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel" by Robert Crais

Elvis Cole has taken quite a few strange cases over the years and the latest is going to be another one. Amy Breslyn is missing. A senior executive at Woodson Energy Solutions, Meryl Lawrence, wants Amy found fast and very quietly. The company manufactures fuels for the Department of Defense and Amy

worked there. Beyond the obvious national security problem with a high level employee disappearing there are other issues.

Amy disappeared, $450,000 is now missing from Amy’s department, and Meryl believes that Amy is being coerced. Meryl wants nobody to know that she hired the “world’s greatest detective” so she paid cash and gave Elvis the bare minimum to get started. He can’t see Amy’s  office or have access to her e-mail or know anything about her work. He knows very little. One of the things he does know includes the fact that Amy’s son, Jacob, died sixteen months ago in a terrorist attack overseas. She also gave him one possible lead which has led Elvis Cole to a house in Echo Park one rainy night.

A lead that is going to result in the involvement of multiple members of the Los Angeles Police Department including K-9 Officer Scott James and his German shepherd, Maggie, a dead bod,  and enough explosives to destroy quite an area. Things are just getting started in The Promise: An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel by Robert Crais.

This latest in the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series is a good one though Pike is regulated to a very small supporting role for most of the book and is not around that much. Told from the point of view of the bad guys, Elvis Cole, Scott James, Maggie, and many others, the read moves through character’s heads as they all pursue their various agendas. That results in some overlap of situations as action sequences and case details are depicted first one way than the other.

This is an action oriented book-- almost thriller like in its lack of character depth-- as the primary few  characters have been fleshed out long before. The only characters that go into any real depth at all are Maggie and her canine handler Scott James. Therefore, it will be helpful to read the preceding book, Suspect, which introduced these two characters as parts of that backstory are referenced here.

The Promise  is a read that powers steadily forward with a focus on action and little else. It is not a normal Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike book as one expects quite a bit more character depth, humor, and meat to the storylines without all the various cardboard cutout characters. Those issues have led some to question whether or not this book was written by the author. It seems clear that it was as it follows the same style and tone as Suspect did. While The Promise is not a book of any depth, it is entertaining and a very fast read. 

The Promise: An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel

Robert Crais

http://www.robertcrais.com

Wheeler Publishing (Gale, Cengage Learning)

http://www.gale.cengage.com/wheeler

November 2015

ISBN# 978-4104-6672-3

Large Print Hardback (standard hardback, audio, and e-book formats are available)

525 Pages

$37.99

Material supplied by the good folks of the Plano Texas Library System.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2016

Mark Troy and the Female Private Detective: Honey West, 1957-1972

Mark Troy is back today with another installment of his series on the female private detective. This time around he covers Honey West. Make sure you check out the earlier installments of this series as well as Mark’s books and website.

Honey West, 1957-1971

I'm H. West, a private eye. The H stands for Honey. I may be female, but I know my business.

Meet Honey West, one of the most successful female private eyes—or private eyeful. She's tough, brainy and sexy, a curvy bombshell with taffy-colored hair, blue eyes, a baby-bottom complexion, and a heart-shaped birthmark on the inside of her right thigh. She is usually armed. The creation of husband and wife team, Forrest (Skip) and Gloria Fickling, writing as G. G. Fickling, Honey appeared in eleven novels from 1957 to 1971.

Skip, a sports writer, and Gloria, a fashion writer, were friends of Richard S. Prather, the creator of Shell Scott, who urged them to write a female private eye. Honey inhabits the same testosterone-charged, Southern California world as Shell. She runs her own agency, which she inherited from her beloved father, Hank West after he was murdered in a Long Beach alley. Finding his killer is what drove her into the business.

The Ficklings modeled Honey on Marilyn Monroe and some critics have described her as the love child of Monroe and Mike Hammer. The stories are hardboiled with lots of gunplay and seamy characters. Honey always carries a gun, usually a small caliber weapon that she can hide easily on her voluptuous body. She knows ". . . as much judo as the Japanese army."

As with Prather, the Ficklings gave the stories a lot of sex-infused zaniness and humor. Honey loses some or all of her clothes in every story, sometimes at the point of a gun.

"Honey West?" a deep voice asked as the office door closed.

"Yes."

"Stand up. Take two steps toward me."

"What is this?" I said, getting to my feet.

"Don't ask questions. Just take off your clothes."

"What?"

"You heard me. You have exactly one minute. Get started!"

Sometimes she loses them by accident as when a huge wave hits her in the Malibu surf and takes her bikini with it. Other times it's plain bad luck as when she gets into a game of strip poker with a man in an effort to find out if he has needle tracks on his arms. Unfortunately for Honey, the cards don't go her way.

We are frequently reminded that Honey is all girl, usually by the leering comments of the men she has to deal with.

"Speaking of bust," Hel said. "Don't you gentlemen agree that our fair captive has a generous amount of the same? What do you do in your spare time, baby? If it's what I think it is, you can count me in any time."

If we don't know what generous means, Honey will tell us.

"I hope I brought the right size bra," he said.

My skirt and slip dropped to the floor. "Thirty eight," I said, trying to focus my eyes in the semi-darkness. "Like the revolver of the same caliber. Is that what you're carrying?"

Whatever men think Honey does in her spare time, she doesn't. For all the banter, there is no graphic sex in the books, hardly any sex at all, in fact, merely innuendo. Though Honey frequently finds herself in compromising situations, she always manages to escape with her virtue intact. She meets many men who could turn her head, but she seldom gets laid. Often it's the men who get laid—laid out with a bullet or a fishing spear, for which she sometimes gets the blame.

The one man who always shows up, sometimes to rescue her, more often to arrest her, is Lieutenant Mark Storm of the Sheriff’s Department. It is implied in the sixth book that they have sex. The two frequently but heads in bouts of mutual exasperation.

"If you had any brains, you'd have married me long ago instead of running around half-cocked and half-naked."

"Lieutenant, I wasn't half-cocked or half-naked when you came in."

Storm is an example of what she is up against.

“You're mixed into this right up to your armpits. Damn you, Honey, for being in this crummy racket, for letting yourself in for capers like this where somebody is either stripping you down or taking wacks at you with a tommy gun. Any sensible woman your age would be married by now with a couple of kids. I figure you and murder are going to end up in the same hole."

Married by now with a couple of kids? She’s only in her twenties at this point, but this was the fifties when being a single, independent, professional woman meant that everybody questioned your motives, or your You don't know how hard it is being a woman looking the way I do.” Would V.I. Warshawski or Sharon McCone put up with the leering and male chauvinism that she endures?

ability, and every man saw you as fair game. Especially when you’re as sexy as Honey. You almost expect her to echo Jessica Rabbit: “

The ninth Honey West story, Bombshell, appeared in 1964. The tenth and eleventh books, Stiff As A Broad, and Honey On Her Tail, appeared in 1971. Between ‘64 and ‘71, private eye fiction suffered a near death and the sexual revolution happened. When we meet Honey again, she has abandoned the eye business for the spy business and is more sexually liberated, jetting around Europe, wearing and losing mod clothes, on the trail of agents of MAD. And, yes, she does finally get some behind-closed-doors action.

In 1965, Honey made the jump to television. She appeared first in an episode of Burke’s Law in which she managed to outwit the chief of police. She got her own series in 1965/1966, becoming the first female lead in a televised crime series. It was produced by Aaron Spelling and starred Ann Francis as Honey.  Spelling gave Francis outfits that emphasized her statuesque figure and good looks, but otherwise dropped the sexual innuendo of the books. In its place, they gave her James Bond gadgetry—listening devices disguised as martini olives or lipstick, gas-bomb earrings, a gas-mask garter belt, and a sleek, Cobra roadster.  She acquired a nosy Aunt Meg and a partner, Sam Bolt, who kept pressuring her to marry him. Her real love was her pet ocelot, Bruce. In nearly every episode, viewers were treated to lithe, blonde Honey tossing large men over her shoulder.

The series lasted one year, thirty episodes. Although popular, it was up against tough competition in the form of Gomer Pyle, USMC. The network declined to renew it for a second season, figuring it was cheaper to import a British series called The Avengers. For her role as Honey West, Ann Francis won a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination. Aaron Spelling went on to do Charlie’s Angels.

Some of the Honey West books can still be found on eBay and Amazon. Honey In The Flesh, the fourth book in the series, is available on Kindle. The entire TV series is available on DVD.

Mark Troy ©2015

Mark Troy is the author of The Splintered Paddle, The Rules, Pilikia Is My Business and Game Face.  His website is at http://marktroymysterywriter.com

Mark Troy and the Female Private Detective: Dol Bonner, 1937

Mark Troy is back today with another installment of his series on the female private detective. This time around he covers Dol Bonner. Make sure you check out the earlier installments of this series as well as Mark’s books and website.

Dol Bonner, 1937

One of the few women that famed misogynist, Nero Wolfe, could tolerate was Theodolinda "Dol" Bonner, a California private eye and partner in the Bonner and Raffray detective agency. We first meet Dol in The Hand In The Glove (1937) by Rex Stout. It is the middle of the Depression. Dol is a socialite whose family has fallen on hard times. She runs the agency with her friend, Sylvia Raffray, another young woman, who is the financial backer of the agency. Dol does the investigating and Sylvia handles the finances. Later on, Dol will take on an assistant, Sally Colt and Sylvia will drop out of the agency.

Sylvia is six months shy of twenty-one and Dol, as she reminds Sylvia at one point, is four years older, which gives Dol more wisdom than her friend. Both women are attractive although I find something strange about Dol from the description Stout gives her.

"Hello, Sylvia." That greeting was from Theodolnda Bonner, Dol to a few, from her chair at her desk. The chair might as well have been a stool, for she sat straight without touching the back, as usual. Her curious caramel-colored eyes flashed a glance at her partner and friend from under coal-black lashes—seeming blacker from the cream-tinted transparency of the smooth skin of her rather narrow face.

Is that straight posture something young women learned in those days? Then there’s this. Dol's smooth skin covering her jawbone has a tiny black spot, ". . . not an old-fashioned court plaster decoration, but her natural property and was generally considered a distinction rather than a blemish," which she touches in moments of tension.

Dol has a presence about her that makes people notice her.

Moving, she gave the impression that she was proceeding with the air rather than through it. Unconsciously, seeing her move, or hearing her speak, people settled into their chairs more easily, it was so pleasant to see energy flowing like that with no strain and no interruption of grace.

Dol doesn't care much for men, an attitude that comes out in an argument with Sylvia.

"It must be nice to have a man tell you just what to do." To another person who is in on the conversation, she says, "It will be your turn next to tell her what to do. Stay and admire the virtue of submissiveness." When Sylvia protests that she's not submissive to any man, Dol says, "I don't like men."

Dol's independence streak comes out when she is asked why "a girl of your ability" picked the detective business.

"I know, Martin," Dol sounded patient. "I could have got a job as a stylist or an executive secretary, or started a hat shop or a shopping service. May I just say that I didn't want to? I could add that I wouldn't accept any man as a boss and preferably no woman either, and I made a long list of all the activities I might undertake on my own. They all seemed monotonous or distasteful except two or three and I flipped a coin between detective and landscape design. I had to swallow my pride to take a favor from one man to get a license."

It’s not clear if her dislike of men includes all men in all circumstances, or just those who try to tell her what to do, which would certainly be many. It does not discourage her perennial suitor, a newspaperman named Len Chisholm.

In The Hand In The Glove, Dol discovers a murder and solves it herself, foiling the police. She is not afraid of gunplay and extracts a confession from her suspect at the point of a gun.

The Hand In The Glove is the only novel in which Dol is the protagonist. She plays a major role in the Nero Wolfe novella, Too Many Detectives, and appears in Bad For Business, If Death Ever Slept, Plot It Yourself, and Motherhunt. Wolfe hires her and her agency whenever he thinks the case requires a woman investigator.

Dol has a similar impact on Archie Goodwin as she does on Wolfe. In Too Many Detectives Archie begins his report by saying he is against female detectives on principle. But at the end of Motherhunt he states that Dol and her assistant Sally have made him change his attitude about female detectives.

One novel and a half dozen appearances is not much of a legacy. Dol Bonner is notable because the publication of The Hand In The Glove in 1937, the same year as the first Bertha Cool novel, makes her one of the first women detectives to appear as a protagonist in a novel. 1937 was also three years after the first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer De Lance, at the start of Rex Stout’s long career. Stout was still experimenting with detectives. He does not develop Dol Bonner the way he developed Nero Wolfe, but we can only speculate what he might have done if Wolfe had not been so successful. Would he have devoted more stories to Dol?

The Hand In The Glove can still be found online, in bookstores and libraries. Since it’s original printing in 1937, it has had seven editions, most recently in 2011.  It was made into a television movie by NBC in 1992 titled Lady Against The Odds starring Crystal Bernard as Dol Bonner.

REMINDER---- Writers in the central Texas area might be interested in a workshop on "Women and Crime", Saturday, September 5, in College Station, Texas. More information here: http://www.meetup.com/Brazos-Writers-of-Bryan-College-Station/events/223360417/

Mark Troy ©2015

Mark Troy is the author of The Splintered Paddle, The Rules, Pilikia Is My Business and Game Face.  His website is at http://marktroymysterywriter.com

Mark Troy and the Female Private Detective: Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, 1939-1970

Mark Troy is back today with another installment of his series on the female private detective. I am learning a lot as I had no idea about any of this. From what I am hearing off list from folks who do not want to post a comment on these blogs, the same is true for many of you. 

Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, 1939-1970

 

You have to like a dame who comes up with expressions such as "Well can me for a sardine" and "Well peel me for a grape." These are some of the many "coolisms" that pepper the speech of extra-large, penny-pinching widow, Bertha Cool created by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A, Fair. Bertha ran B. Cool Confidential Investigations in Los Angeles.

The first novel in the series. The Bigger They Come, was published in 1939. The final one. All Grass Isn't Green was published in 1970, the year of Gardner's death. There were twenty-nine books in all. The series lasted thirty-one years, making Bertha the longest running female private eye until passed by Sharon McCone in 2008.

Bertha is white-haired and hefty, weighing up to 250 pounds in some stories. She is not pleasant to look at or to be around unless she is coddling up to a client who is offering money. Berth does love money and she is not above soaking her clients for all she can get. She is corrupt and dishonest, and willing to break the law. In the first book, she takes on a diminutive, disbarred partner, Donald Lam, who remains with her through the entire series. Lam stands about five feet. He has a penchant for bending and twisting the law where Bertha out-and-out breaks it. As Bertha says, "He's a little runt, but he's brainy." For his part, Lam sees Bertha as "a big spool of barbed wire."

Together Cool and Lam make up one of the most mis-matched detective duos since Violet McDade and Nevada Alverado. Gardner was friends with Cleve Adams, the creator of Violet and Nevada, so the similarities are probably more than coincidental.

At the heart of the relationship between these two characters is their constant bickering. They bicker about everything. They bicker about money and Bertha's greedy, penny-pinching ways. They bicker about Donald's taste in women. Bertha thinks he falls too easily for the pretty ones. They bicker about Donald's tendency to keep her in the dark as the cases develop.

In Spill the Jackpot (1941) Lam quits his job because he has lost his heart to a woman and plans to run away with her. Bertha won't hear of it. She tells him he's not in love. “You’ve just fallen for some little trollop who’s given you the come-hither eye. My God, if you knew as much about women as I do, you’d never even think of marrying one.”

Gardner's plots are mind-spinning in their intricacy. He favored dialogue and action over characterization. He stressed "speed, situation, and suspense" in his writing and that's what you get in the Bertha Cool and Donald Lam stories. The storylines are so twisted and tangled that the reader marvels at Gardner's ability to keep it all straight. Some of the twists and tangles are created by Bertha and Donald themselves who are constantly scheming and conniving to manipulate situations so that their sense of justice is satisfied. Even Lam's quitting his job in Jackpot turns out to be a contrivance that breaks open the case.

Some reviewers have said that Gardner gave his best writing to Bertha.  Had Bertha been given a TV series like her literary sibling, Perry Mason, she might hold a higher place in the public consciousness. A TV pilot was made and aired on CBS in 1958. It starred Benay Venuta as Bertha and Billy Pearson as Donald Lam, but it never developed into a series.

The Bertha Cool books are easy to find. Used copies can be found on Amazon and in used bookstores. Some are available on Kindle. One of the books, Top of the Heap, has been republished by Hard Case Crime.

Writers in the central Texas area might be interested in a workshop on "Women and Crime", Saturday, September 5, in College Station, Texas. More information here: http://www.meetup.com/Brazos-Writers-of-Bryan-College-Station/events/223360417/

Mark Troy ©2015

Mark Troy is the author of The Splintered Paddle, The Rules, Pilikia Is My Business and Game Face.  His website is at http://marktroymysterywriter.com

Mark Troy and the Female Private Detective: Sarah Watson, 1935-1938

Please welcome back Mark Troy with his perspective on the female private detective. Two Wednesdays ago he detailed Carrie Cashin. This week his focus is on Sarah Watson.

Mark Troy and the Female Private Detective: Sarah Watson, 1935-1938

Among the sisterhood of female crime-fighters are many attractive, hardboiled Janes who have every man they encounter eating out of their hands. Sarah Watson is not one of them. She is middle-aged, frumpy, heavy and charmless. ". . . a large woman,  solid with the solidity of rock." Her clothes are "rusty black," her hair is gray and her bosom is "rigidly corseted." She wears old-fashioned headgear and square-toed shoes. With her craggy chin and incipient moustache, she is not a doll to make the cover of a magazine.

The creation of D. B. McCandless, Sarah Watson appeared in eleven stories in Detective Fiction Weekly from 1935 to 1938. She ran the Watson Detective Agency, ably assisted by a tall, thin red-head named Ben Todd, whom she calls "whipper snapper." The stories are more medium than hard boiled, but the narrative is fast-paced and highly readable.

Sarah carries a gat, as does just about everybody in these stories, and she's not afraid to pull it out of the pocket of her skirt. Neither is she intimidated by gorillas who wield them. When a man sticks a gun into her stomach, she says, "If you shoot there, feller, the bullet will flatten on solid whalebone." More than one gorilla bears the marks of her pistol whipping. Sarah admits that she would like to ". . . beat up a man proper, for once! I'd begin on the nose...The nose is a nice tender place to begin. Maybe I'd break it -- after a while."

Sarah is all determination. She won’t back down from anybody, whether it be the law, a banker, bureaucrats or gangsters, who stand in the way of her solving the case and getting the geetus, and, usually, someone’s goat. Those who do come up against her grudgingly admire her intelligence.

Sarah is amazingly agile for her size and age, able to climb over gates and leap off of trains easily. The stories strain credibility. Sarah is a lone vigilante in a world of bumbling police and incompetent district attorneys. When a known crime figure kidnaps and kills a young girl, only Sarah can bring him to justice by planting the ransom money on him--money which she herself obtained by breaking into the district attorney’s home and taking from his desk where it was conveniently left outside of a locked safe. In another story, she constructs a dummy out of Ben Todd’s clothes, along with a parachute, and tosses the bundle out the window of an airliner in a ruse to convince a crook that someone else has made off with his stolen loot.

In spite of the credibility gap, the stories are fun reads, chiefly due to the interplay between Sarah and the long-suffering Ben. Ben is brash and impetuous and needs to be restrained for his own and Sarah’s good. She locks him in closets or the back of her car, and even singes his hair with a warning shot. He calls her a she-devil and harridan when he’s angry with her, and “old girl” when he’s not. At the end of a case full of bickering, however, she is willing to share her lunch with him, which, of course, she brought from home.

Some of the Sarah Watson stories can be found through an internet search. Two of the best—“The Corpse in the Crystal” (1937) and “He Got What He Asked For” (1937)—are reprinted in Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007). Little is known about D. B. McCandless. It’s not even known if McCandless is a man or a woman. He or she is the author of over fifty stories appearing in such magazines as Detective Fiction Weekly, Gangster Stories, Speakeasy Stories, and others. He or she does not appear to have written any novel-length stories.

Mark Troy is the author of The Splintered Paddle, The Rules, Pilikia Is My Business, and Game Face. His website is http://marktroymysterywriter.com

Via Sons of Spade-- Night Tremors (Rick Cahill) by Matt Coyle

Night Tremors (Rick Cahill) by Matt Coyle

Review: "The Untreed Detectives" edited by J. Alan Hartman

After a short introduction to the book by, publisher J. Alan Hartman, it is on to the twelve short stories. Some are written by names you may recognize. Others by names that are unfamiliar to you. All authors involved have weaved a complex tale very worthy of their inclusion in The Untreed Detectives anthology released last year.

Kara L. Barney leads things off with “A Knife in the Dark.” This story is set in the time before Sherlock became legendary. Watson has been injured by a killer as this story opens and Mrs. Hudson is urgently needed to save his life. She will also need to do far more then stitch Watson's stab wounds in order to bring this case to be a successful conclusion.

Paula and Mitexi run the uniquely named PMS Private Investigations in “Angus Wants a Peanut” by Amber Rochelle Gillet. According to Mitexi, the two have to be in Lilli Pad Park at 11m by the statue of the bull frog to meet a Mr. Ryan Majors. He insists on meeting there and won't discuss what he requires until that time. After the very serious previous story, this occasionally amusing tale is nice chance of pace. Mr. Ryan as well as his case are quite surprise.

Jessie Schroeder has moved back to her small town of Riverport in the wake of a brutal divorce. She has resumed writing while moving on with her life. In “Breathing Under Water” by Janet Majerus, Jessie has traveled to La Cumbre, New Mexico, to teach a writing workshop for her friend Sharon. Fortunately for her she won’t be the only instructor. The small workshop of ten students in this mountainous location in northern New Mexico is going to be interesting. She had needed a break from home on many levels, but this is not what she had intended at all in this serious story.

“Dessie's Jaded Past” by Lesley A. Diehl comes next. Like Jessie in the story before this one, Kaitlin Singer is starting over after her divorce. She has come home to the Catskill Mountains to write children's books and get on with life. Her plans for solitude have been interrupted as Mary Jane and her son, Jeremy, have moved in with her. So too has their potbellied pig, Desdemona. She has helped capture the killer of the newspaper's advice columnist and will play a vital role again in this tale.

Known for his book In Dog We Trust and others, author Neil Plakcy contributes “Dog Is in the Details” next. Rochester, a two year old Golden Retriever, helps Steve Levitan not only find his father's sport jacket, but how to deal with some painful aspects of the past.

Halloween in Philadelphia is the setting for “Faint Heart” by Gillian Roberts. For Amanda Pepper, a teacher who should be working on the essays of her seniors, she is instead thinking about how the magic of Halloween isn't around anymore. That is until Rosalie Tucker, new to the faculty, comes into the lounge talking about the scary gorilla outside in the square across the street. Something may have been out there, but it is Halloween and there are private school students to teach. Soon there will be a murder case to solve.

Imogene Duckworthy has been solving cases since she was a child. We see a little bit of that childhood here in “Immy Goes to the Dogs” by Kaye George. It began near her home of Saltlick, Texas when she pet sat Mrs. Yarbrough's two Cocker Spaniels. It is the summer and Immy is supposed to let out Sweetums and Tweetums so they can do their business and get them back into the house. Should have been a simple deal, but there were complications.

If you don't like clowns you probably won't like a story where clowns are an actual species. In “Scandalous Silence” by Whit Howland, not only are clowns a species they bleed makeup and not blood. Cheating happens on that world just like they do here and Huey Dusk’s latest case is about somebody cheating on somebody. It is a dark and twisted world and Huey travels the mean streets of Kermisberg doing what he needs to do to make a buck. At least the clown gangs and mime syndicates don't exist anymore and one can get Bubble Gum Whiskey.

Diana Andrews is being asked by Detective Breitwieser if she knows anything about a certain guy as “Split the Difference” by Albert Tucher begins. She does not know him, but she knows of him. As a prostitute she knows to stay well away from the man known as “The Baker.” The detective wants her help and she really has no choice.

Instead of sitting in a car conducting surveillance on a cheater, P. I. Nathaniel P. Osgood III works cases involving nursery rhyme and fairy tale characters. In “The Cinderella Caper” by Herschel Cozine we learn the real truth about that tramp Cinderella and lots of other things in this occasionally amusing tale.

P. I. Guillermo Lombardo is at work in “The Wrong Move” by Rodolfo Pena. Chess, a complicated case, and Mexico City combine well here in a tale that is part mystery and part thriller. Not all chess games are on boards.

“The Trident Caper” by Wade J. McMahan is the final story and features private detective Richard Dick in a mystery tale that has paranormal elements as well as fantasy elements. Interrupting Dick's chess game with Percy (a ghost) she walked into his Chicago office. Great body, great legs, but the hair is green. She says her name is “Coral” and has no last name as the merpeople don't have them. Coral is a mermaid who is on a long trip from home looking for more than her father's treasure chest. The chest does not matter for her, but they also took her father's golden trident and she wants that back.

A section of author bios brings the book to a close.

This is an interesting anthology of twelve stories where each one contains a mystery of some type. Not all mysteries have a murder case and several that do not are contained here in The Untreed Detectives. The stories fluctuate widely in tone as some are light hearted and even playful while others are far more serious. Most of the tales here are short stories featuring series characters from novels which gives readers an excellent way to sample various author's works. It is an interesting smorgasbord of cases that will provide plenty of good reading.

The Untreed Detectives

Edited by J. Alan Hartman

Untreed Reads Publishing

http://www.untreedreads.com

December 2013

ASIN: B00HEXNVAW

E-Book

160 Pages

$5.99

Material was supplied in the form of a PDF by the editor some time ago in exchange for my objective review.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2014

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